Manpower is a 1941 film about power company linemen starring Edward G. Robinson, Marlene Dietrich, and George Raft. The memorable posters for the movie proclaimed, "Robinson - He's mad about Dietrich. Dietrich - She's mad about Raft. Raft - He's mad about the whole thing." The film was written by Richard Macauley and Jerry Wald, and directed by Raoul Walsh.
Robinson and Raft got into a fistfight on the set that was eagerly splashed all over the front pages of the nation's newspapers. Victor McLaglen was originally going to play Robinson's role, which would have made it a supporting part, and Raft reportedly resented sharing leading man status on the film as a result of Robinson being cast instead.
Raft chose Manpower over the remake of the 1931 pre-Code version of Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, and the career-catapulting role of "Sam Spade" went to Humphrey Bogart instead.
The script is one of many reworkings of the plotline for a 1932 Robinson movie called Tiger Shark, in which Robinson played essentially the same part, only as a tuna fisherman rather than an electric power lineman. The supporting cast of Manpower includes Alan Hale, Sr. (lookalike father of Gilligan's Island's "Skipper"), Frank McHugh, and Eve Arden.
Critical reaction
Bosley Crowther wrote a positive review for the film noting that the cast of the Warner Bros. film was outstanding. "With such exceptional material, the Warner blacksmiths couldn't help but make good—good, in this sense—meaning the accomplishment of a tough, fast, exciting adventure film."[1] Channel 4's review of the movie notes the exciting setting of the film makes it worth seeing, but goes on to pan the film. "Directed with the usual efficiency by Walsh, Manpower's weak script never manages to convince despite the setting and the strong cast."[2]
Mesa is a fictional star-nation in the Honorverse, the background setting for a series of novels and short stories in the military science fiction genre, written by David Weber and others and published by Baen Books. In the more recent novels and stories of the Honorverse, Mesa has been slowly replacing Haven as the main antagonist nation.
Mesa is an independent planet located within Solarian League space. It was founded by a group of renegade Beowulfans who rejected the Beowulf code.[1] Mesa is controlled by a Council of several interstellar corporations. The best-known of these is Manpower Incorporated, a company that grows genetically engineered humans as slaves. Another major Mesan corporation is the Jessyk Combine, a transport corporation mostly controlled by Manpower which operates its fleet of slave transports.
Mesa probably has the highest level of genetic engineering in the galaxy (primarily since the technology is shunned by most planets). The Mesans' skill at genetic engineering is used to produce slaves that are designed for various functions, but it has also been used in a long term plan to "improve" the leaders of Mesa.
Genetic slavery
Although slavery is outlawed in most of the galaxy, Solarian bureaucracies and large corporations find tolerance of slavery, Manpower, and Mesa generally to be advantageous. Some star nations, notably the Star Kingdom of Manticore and the Republic of Haven (formerly the People's Republic of Haven), are far less tolerant. Their navies have long stringently enforced anti-slavery agreements, and even a few Solarian Navy commanders do as well, often by turning captured slave transports over to navies of Manticore or the Republic. As a result, Mesa is in a long term and somewhat active cold war with at least two star nations. It is in a much hotter war with the Audubon Ballroom, an organization of escaped slaves whose policy includes kidnapping and assassination of those involved in the slave trade.
Manpower's main market is the Solarian League, or rather some large corporations in the League. They use slave labor industrially and at pleasure resorts. Both uses are illegal, but somewhat tolerated in practice. Slaves are also marketed in the Silesian Confederacy, often to large, though shady, businesses based in Silesia and elsewhere. When Manticore and the Andermani Empire seized control of the Confederacy at the resumption of the Haven-Manticore war after several years of cease-fire and "negotiations", the prospects for slavery in Silesia took a turn for the worse.
Manpower and other Mesan multistellar corporations have numerous facilities off Mesa, but these have been under some pressure on occasion from some navies, and from the Audubon Ballroom in every case it can manage to undermine Mesan operations. One of the most famous Mesan off-world facilities was the planet Verdant Vista (a.k.a. Congo) recently liberated by joint Manticoran–Solarian–Audubon Ballroom operation and transformed into the independent Kingdom of Torch.
At All Costs depicts a meeting of important Mesan corporate officials, and it is stated for the first time that Mesa is involved in plots covering centuries, possibly with the eventual goal of controlling all of human-settled space. (Albrecht Detweiler, the apparent Mesan chief executive, is probably the descendant of Leonard Detweiler, who was a major proponent of genetic engineering and an opponent of the Cherwell Convention.) Mesan nanotechnology is currently being used by their operatives to forestall any peace talks between Haven and Manticore, out of fear that the two nations and their allies would turn against their one true common enemy: Mesa itself. Unfortunately for Mesa, these particular activities have now attracted the attention and suspicions of Victor Cachat and Anton Zilwicki, who are investigating the matter.
In Storm from the Shadows it is revealed, that Manpower and the slave trade are only a cover up for Detweiler's real plans.
